Blogs|May 14, 2010

WebClient and DeploymentCatalog gotchas in Silverlight OOB

This is a quick post to share a gotcha I found that may be impacting others. I am in the process of building a large composable application for a customer using Silverlight 4 and the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). The application has a framework that supports multiple line of business applications that are dynamically loaded…
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Blogs|May 11, 2010

MVVM Coding by Convention (Convention over Configuration)

Convention-based programming is an interesting model. In essence, it attempts to reduce the potential for error by handling most scenarios based on conventions or standards, and allowing the developers to focus on the exceptions. Probably one of the most thorough public resources I’ve seen for the convention-based model is Rob Eisenberg’s Build your Own MVVM…
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Blogs|May 11, 2010

Add OneNote 2010 Linked Notes Capabilities to your Application

If you’ve ever talked to me or read this blog, you know I’m a passionate OneNote user. If it weren’t for OneNote, I would be a random mess. One of the new features in OneNote 2010 is Linked Notes, which let you link the notes you are taking in OneNote to the program you’re working…
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Blogs|May 11, 2010

Paraffin 3.12: A Bug Fix and Three New Features

After a bit of rest and relaxation, Paraffin, my tool to make managing your Windows Installer XML (WiX) fragments easier makes a surprise appearance back on my blog. If you’re not familiar with Paraffin search this blog for numerous entries. Grab the latest version here. The relevant changes are as follows. I moved everything over…
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Blogs|May 9, 2010

Different Ways to Start Processes under a Debugger

The other day I got a question about how to start a process under the debugger and there are quite a few different ways to do that. I thought I’d discuss them all because the information about how to do each of these is scattered around various spots in the Visual Studio documentation. As the…
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Blogs|May 4, 2010

Improving Windows Azure Storage Throughput Using the Content Delivery Network

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches your Windows Azure Data Storage blobs at strategically placed locations around the world (18 at the time of this blog post). The purpose of the CDN is to provide maximum bandwidth for delivery of content to our applications and users. Building massively scalable applications requires squeezing every ounce…
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Blogs|May 2, 2010

Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) Versions, Images, and Isolated Storage

This is a quick and simple post to address three very common questions I receive about Silverlight Out-of-Browser (OOB) applications. In case you haven’t heard, applications made with Silverlight version 3 and later can be installed locally to your machine (whether it is a Windows machine or a Mac) and run “out of the browser”…
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Blogs|May 1, 2010

MEF: DLL Versions and Multiple Exports for a Class

During my talk about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at Devscovery this past week, I had two very good questions asked by the audience and promised I’d get an answer. The first one was about exporting in MEF. I was under the impression that a MEF part could have one export, but I was mistaken.…
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Blogs|Apr 26, 2010

MVVM with Transaction and View Locator Example

I had a lot of requests after both of my posts about transaction with the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and Yet Another View Locator Pattern to provide a sample project. You asked, I listened, and here it is. I’ll walk through how I built the example. Most of the code is taken verbatim from my two…
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Blogs|Apr 22, 2010

Transactions with MVVM

One objection to MVVM I often hear is that it doesn’t manage transactions well. I’m not talking about database transactions or “true atomic” transactions, but those short-lived transactions that happen in the UI. With data-binding, updates happen immediately. If I pass a validation, the field is updated. Many applications, however, don’t work this way. While…
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Blogs|Apr 20, 2010

Learning Windows Azure platform Resources

I’ve assembled a short list of training materials and utilities that are helpful in learning the Windows Azure platform Windows Azure SDK v1.1 samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=dba6a576-468d-4ef6-877e-b14e3c865d3a&displaylang=en Windows Azure Samples: C:Program FilesWindows Azure SDKv1.1Samples.zip Windows Azure platform AppFabric v1.0 Code Samples http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=39856A03-1490-4283-908F-C8BF0BFAD8A5&displaylang=en C:Program Files (x86)Windows Azure platform AppFabric SDKV1.0Samples Windows Azure Platform Training Kit http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=413e88f8-5966-4a83-b309-53b7b77edf78&displaylang=en Windows Azure…
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Blogs|Apr 14, 2010

Converting Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4

In this video, I wanted to share just how quick and easy it is to convert a Silverlight 3 project to Silverlight 4. The steps are basically as follows: Make sure you have the Silverlight 4 tools If you use Blend or any of the interactivity extensions (for triggers and behaviors) be sure to get…
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